A Macabre Kingdom of Masks

This nightmarish vision was shaped not only by Ensor's pessimism but by his critical view of contemporary art.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

By

Mary Tompkins Lewis

March 15, 2013 10:37 p.m. ET

The Belgian Symbolist artist James Ensor (1860-1949) was an odd man out in late-19th-century vanguard painting, and his best work is nearly as dense and bewildering today. After a period of study and early work in Brussels, Ensor at the age of 20 retreated to the quiet seaside town of Ostend. For decades, he lived above the store where his family sold carnival masks, kept a cramped studio in the attic, and painted some of his bleakest and most scathing critiques of the world he seemed to have left behind. Though often opaque, Ensor's characteristic paintings from these years—marked by crowded, claustrophobic spaces; menacing, masked figures; and bitterly satiric caricatures—offer, at first glance, few surprises.

But the Getty Museum's acquisition in 1987 of "Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889"—painted when Ensor was just 28, and kept by the hermetic artist until his death—has allowed visitors to the Los Angeles museum to see the brash young painter in a brilliant new light. The work's murallike proportions, urban setting and forceful imagery are perfectly geared to the large, luminous gallery and public audience it now enjoys. After the canvas was cleaned, it became clear that Ensor's nightmarish vision of a boisterous city boulevard teeming with banners, placards and a massed, modern rabble was shaped not only by the artist's deep-seated pessimism but by his critical view of contemporary art, captured here in dazzling displays of virtuoso painting that are as variable, original and richly parodic as the painter's darkly comic brigade.

The haunting effect of Ensor's sea of masked figures, who cascade toward us on a surging, endless tide, is due in part, as the art historian Patricia Berman has described, to the collapsing perspectives and multiple viewpoints the artist employed to create a sense of chaos. The boulevard rises like a raking stage, and—framed by the green rostrum at right, balconies that furiously recede at left, and a prosceniumlike black band and red banner that compress the image at center—dissolves in the distance as the parade lurches to the right and disappears.

The painting's panoramic scale, the proximity and wealth of its detail, and the drumbeat advance of Ensor's dystopian horde force the spectator to scramble to take it all in. As we scan the crowd, our gaze is akin to that of the costumed characters on the viewing platform at right, but quickly shifts to eye level as the foreground gives way to some of Ensor's most frightening and crudely painted figures—a top-hatted skeleton, a swollen prelate, ghoulish clowns, and grimacing, disembodied masks—who threaten to spill into our space. In the lower-right corner, and executed with a far more circumspect touch, a likely portrait of the Marquis de Sade underscores the disturbing import of the apparition above.

Although Ensor had helped found the avant-garde Belgian coalition Les XX in 1883, his "Entry" was deemed too radical for exhibition five years later by his cohorts, whose aesthetic tended more toward French Impressionism. And the painting's uncompromising modernity, often linked to the Belgian anarchist movement, is one from which Ensor would soon retreat.

When they had shown the French Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" in 1887, the XX artists lauded his well-mannered painting of a Parisian crowd. Octave Maus, the group's leader, even called Seurat the "Messiah of a new art." Ensor's titular, ironic subject, the haloed figure of Christ at center, who is both alone and engulfed by a roisterous mob, is virtually hidden from view. It is considered a self-portrait and—along with the painter's red signature at right, the sanguine "XX" insignia at far left, and the painting's prospective date—suggests Ensor's intent to cast himself as the true prophet of the art to come. Even more emphatic was his rejection of Seurat's Pointillist technique and what he considered the painter's coldly impersonal forms. In Ensor's "Entry," the rebuke is clear: The dots of color that trace the path of Ensor's parade dissipate into infinity and nothingness in the distance.

The painting's brutalized characters, drawn from history, the Bible, popular culture and even Ensor's family, align the Symbolist artist with a satiric tradition that includes such earlier Northern painters as Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel.

Yet the work is rife with references to 1880s Belgium. Rather than depicting a specific location, Ensor offers a telling amalgam and carnivalesque inversion of an entire genre that, as articulated by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, celebrated the spectacle of modern urban life. Ensor's parade may well reflect the tradition of religious processionals, including the bawdy rites of Mardi Gras, and the more secular, nationalist pageantry of "Joyous Entry" paintings that for centuries had commemorated the triumphant return of militia or monarchs to their capital cities. He also knew the French Impressionists' paintings of expansive avenues, exquisite vistas and elegant bourgeois society that marked the stunning transformation of Napoleon III's Paris into a gleaming, modern metropolis.

Leopold II of Belgium had likewise remade Brussels into a modern city punctuated by royal monuments, streamlined facades and broad new boulevards that implied not only prosperity but a controlling order. By the late 1880s, however, Belgium's state of affairs mirrored the tragic fate of France after the 1871 Paris Commune. Ensor's painting may summon his country's struggle against economic and political oppression. His congested street and sinister, motley swarm—which includes parodies of Leopold's retinue, brutally racist caricatures and even a Congo mask that may allude to his reign's imperial ambitions—shatter one of the period's most cherished pictorial schemas by transforming the modern city into a maelstrom of disorder, alienation and hypocrisy.

Whether the artist also reflects, as some have argued, his era's fascination with the "madness of crowds"—or announces here the arrival of a radical new order for the masses—few would dispute his contemporary Emile Verhaeren's contention that Ensor's macabre kingdom of masks was "not reminiscent of a carnival in distant Italy or Flanders but of a hell on earth."

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.